What high-performance IT teams look like today — and how to build one

Our mental models of what constitutes a high-performance team have evolved considerably over the past five years. Pre-pandemic, high-performance teams were co-located, multidisciplinary, self-organizing, agile, and data-driven. These teams focused on delivering reliable technology capabilities, improving end-user experiences, and establishing data and analytics capabilities.

High performance back then generally focused on delivery — a contrast to previous generations of IT where business and IT alignment was an issue, and teams struggled to deliver with waterfall project management practices. 

Post-pandemic, high-performance teams excelled at remote and hybrid working models, were more empathetic to individual needs, and leveraged automation to reduce manual work. As many organizations were accelerating digital transformation initiatives, the higher-performing teams excelled at change management and agile planning practices. 

We’re now entering a new gen AI era, which is already impacting how we staff teams, their business objectives, and the tools they use to deliver innovations. CIOs have a new opportunity to communicate a gen AI vision for using copilots and improve their collaborative cultures to help accelerate AI adoption while avoiding risks.

What is a high-performance team today?

At a recent Coffee With Digital Trailblazers event, I asked speakers to characterize high-performance teams. Joe Puglisi, former CIO and now investor, advisor, and board member, notes that high-performance teams excel at communications, show great initiative, adapt to changing circumstances, and are increasingly more diverse. Joanne Friedman, PhD and CEO of Connektedminds, says the advent of gen AI requires high-performing teams to accept ethical responsibilities, improve strategic decision-making methods, and adopt continuous or lifelong learning. John Patrick Luethe, managing partner at Redapt, says high-performance teams are comfortable heading into the unknown and must adapt to the stress of hitting deadlines and delivering business outcomes. 

Simon Green, CIO at Pax8, says, “A high-performance team in a hybrid workplace world is characterized by well-defined, self-sustaining working patterns that require minimal oversight, which is crucial in hybrid working models where flexibility and trust are paramount.”

These sentiments align with research from Dale Carnegie on creating a culture of high-performance teams. According to the research, only 30% of teams are high-performing and exceeded their goals this past year. What sets them apart is that 85% of high-performance teams say team goals are well-defined, and they focus on closing productivity, satisfaction, and culture perception gaps between leaders and employees. High-performance teams also have a much greater access to training and development at 74% compared to other teams at 49%.

Putting that together, it’s becoming clear that high-performance teams today are:

• Prioritizing accelerating end-user adoption of new capabilities to deliver strategic business outcomes, rather than simply delivering solutions to requirements;
• Focusing on relationships, communications, and continuous learning to better align objectives with business and stakeholder goals;
• Emphasizing experimentation while managing risk and being faster to adapt to change.

Having the right team technical skills and proficiency is becoming less of a factor for high-performanace teams, in part because AI is evolving to help complete many implementation tasks while partners can fill other skill gaps. Additionally, top technology platforms have invested considerably in ease-of-use, onboarding experiences, and low-code capabilities, simplifying implementations and reducing skill-level barriers.

How CIOs should redefine high-performance objectives

As I’ve said in the past, IT leaders should constantly reevaluate how well their organizations are performing to highly-evolving objectives. That recommendation is even more relevant today, given how AI, platform, and partnering capabilities are changing from solution-focused teams to a greater emphasis on problems and opportunities.

This shift in focus requires teams to understand business strategy, market trends, customer needs, and value propositions. They must define target outcomes, experiment with many solutions, capture feedback, and seek optimal paths to delivering multiple objectives while minimizing risks.

To achieve this, CIOs need to redefine what high performance means at three levels:

• The CIO’s leadership team of direct reports should focus on developing executive relationships, leading communications, driving diversity, and defining digital KPIs.
• Those leading digital transformation and other strategic initiatives should be defining vision statements, understanding end-user needs, setting roadmap delivery objectives, and ensuring change management is at the forefront of their agile process.
• Emerging leaders who may be agile team leaders and product owners should prioritize developing business acumen and improving facilitation skills to lead self-organizing teams.

While the focus at these three levels differ, CIOs should provide a consistent definition of high performance and how it’s measured. A good starting point is Dale Carnegie’s definition of high-performance teams exceeding their yearly goals.

Tips for cultivating high-performance teams today

In addition to redefining what high performance means at their organization, CIOs can cultivate modern high-performance teams by embracing the following strategic tips.

1. Communicate the vision and set realistic expectations

“Today’s high-performing teams are hybrid, dynamic, and autonomous,” says Ross Meyercord, CEO of Propel Software. “CIOs need to create a clear vision and articulate and model the organization’s values to drive alignment and culture.”

High-performance teams are self-organizing and want significant autonomy in prioritizing work, solving problems, and leveraging technology platforms. But most enterprises can’t operate like young startups with complete autonomy handed over to devops and data science teams. CIOs should articulate a technology vision that includes agile principles around self-organization and other non-negotiables around security, data governance, reporting, deployment readiness, and other compliance areas.

Puglisi says a second key CIO responsibility is to set realistic expectations with teams and their executive stakeholders. CIOs should consider stepping into the conversation as facilitators when teams and stakeholders are at a standstill negotiating timelines and scope. One way to do this is to ensure all digital transformation initiatives have documented vision statements and clearly defined business and end-user objectives when scheduling major deployments.

2. Drive culture by example: Customer centricity, diverse hiring, experimentation

“The best CIOs are the change agents in their organizations and encourage their teams to explore new ways of doing things,” says Gal Shaul, chief product and technology officer and co-founder at Augury. “It happens when one can enable a culture of curiosity, courage, and creativity within the organization, and the entire organization constantly learns and develops.”

High-performance teams are open to new ideas and actively tune into the principles and behaviors exemplified by leaders they trust. While there are many ways to promote culture, CIOs must lead by example and ask questions that show commitment to key cultural principles. Below are three examples:

• Demonstrate customer centricity by taking team leaders to visit customers, attend industry events, ask business stakeholders questions, and discuss learnings.
• Commit to diverse hiring practices, adopt inclusive meetings, lead empathy-building exercises, and address tech team burnout.
• Partner with the CHRO to drive an experimental culture that extends beyond IT-led proof of concepts (POCs) and into ways the organization partners on defining opportunities, testing minimally viable solutions, and learning from customer feedback.

3. Prioritize product and change management in gen AI programs

CIOs are under pressure to find value from gen AI investments, which requires channeling high-performance teams to the most opportunistic and impactful business areas. CIOs should influence teams to adopt product management disciplines and measure business value across several dimensions, including but not limited to financial results so that teams identify opportunities before diving into solutions and implementations. 

“When building and cultivating a high-performance team, prioritize areas where they can make the most impact and seize early opportunities for tackling more complex challenges,” says Dalan Winbush, CIO of Quickbase. “Simplify work by adopting and experimenting with AI technologies, ensuring that teams, processes, and governance are intentionally structured to support advancements without risking the integrity of the business or technology foundations.”

Equally important for CIOs is to train high-performance teams on change management practices and ensure they are considering how to ease end-user adoption while realigning business processes. A fundamental mistake of digital transformation is leaving out change management or instituting its practices too late into an initiative. While many employees are excited by the opportunity to experiment with gen AI, delivering business outcomes requires a strategic approach to delivering productivity, quality, and other business benefits.

4. Provide support around challenging people issues

High-performance teams are often involved in leading digital transformation initiatives where conflicts around priorities and solutions among team members and stakeholders can arise. These conflicts can turn into heated debates, and CIOs sometimes have to step in to help manage challenging people issues.

“When a CIO observes misaligned goals or intra-IT conflict, they need to step in immediately to prevent organizational scar tissue from forming,” says Meyercord of Propel Software. “In today’s hybrid workplace, small issues that historically could have been resolved quickly can fester and create long-term damage.”

CIOs should focus on helping high-performance teams with these three personas in particular:

• Executive detractors whose incentives align with legacy business models and become vocally antagonistic to the transformation team’s objectives. Challenging executive detractors may be above the team’s pay grade, so CIOs must take charge and work with the executive team to resolve these issues.
• IT heroes who hoard information and are the only people supporting aspects of important business systems. They make it challenging for others in IT to learn these systems, and favor Superman tactics, coming in to save the day when they’re the only ones who can address an incident. Such behaviors can demoralize high-performance teams, and CIOs should address the issue by rewarding collaboration and investing to improve knowledge sharing. 
• Business stakeholders and subject matter experts who have a long list of unprioritized requirements, prescribe technologies they want teams to use, or significantly challenge teams that recommend addressing problematic technical debt areas. CIOs should help team leaders develop meaningful relationships with business stakeholders and define roles and responsibilities for stakeholder and team interactions.

CIOs looking to accelerate digital transformation, improve business outcomes, and develop emerging technology capabilities must groom more high-performance teams and promote a culture to drive their success. CIOs should consider the impacts of hybrid working, gen AI, and industry competitive factors when defining high performance and investing in team development.